What is "aunt"

Aunt \Aunt\, n. [OF. ante, F. tante, L. amita father's sister. Cf. Amma.]

1. The sister of one's father or mother; -- correlative to nephew or niece. Also applied to an uncle's wife.

   Note: Aunt is sometimes applied as a title or term of endearment to a kind elderly woman not thus related.

2. An old woman; and old gossip. [Obs.]
   --Shak.

3. A bawd, or a prostitute. [Obs.]
   --Shak.

   Aunt Sally, a puppet head placed on a pole and having a pipe in its mouth; also a game, which consists in trying to hit the pipe by throwing short bludgeons at it.

c.1300, from Anglo-French aunte, Old French ante (Modern French tante, from a 13c. variant), from Latin amita "paternal aunt" diminutive of *amma a baby-talk word for "mother" (cognates: Greek amma "mother," Old Norse amma "grandmother," Middle Irish ammait "old hag," Hebrew em, Arabic umm "mother").\n

\nExtended senses include "an old woman, a gossip" (1580s); "a procuress" (1670s); and "any benevolent woman," in American English, where auntie was recorded since c.1790 as "a term often used in accosting elderly women." The French word also has become the word for "aunt" in Dutch, German (Tante), and Danish. Swedish has retained the original Germanic (and Indo-European) custom of distinguishing aunts by separate terms derived from "father's sister" (faster) and "mother's sister" (moster). The Old English equivalents were faðu and modrige. In Latin, too, the formal word for "aunt on mother's side" was matertera. Some languages have a separate term for aunts-in-law as opposed to blood relations.

n. 1 A sister or sister-in-law of someone’s parent. 2 (''also'' great-aunt ''or'' grandaunt) A person's grandparent's sister or sister-in-law. 3 (''usually'' auntie) A grandmother. 4 An affectionate term for a woman of an older generation than oneself, especially a friend of one's parents, by means of fictive kin.

n. the sister of your father or mother; the wife of your uncle [syn: auntie, aunty] [ant: uncle]

An aunt is a person who is the sister, half-sister or sister-in-law of a parent. Aunts are second-degree relatives and share 25% genetic overlap when they are the full sister of the parent. A half-aunt is a half-sister of one's parent and is a third-degree relative with 12.5% genetic overlap. If the aunt is a sister-in-law, direct genetic overlap will typically be 0%, as this person entered the family through marriage and typically is not a blood relative.

A grand-aunt (sometimes written as grand aunt, grandaunt, or great-aunt) is the sister or sister-in-law of a grandparent. The male equivalent of an aunt is an uncle, and the reciprocal relationship is that of a nephew or niece.